He isn’t willing to allow for a rather clear difference between trade and immigration which is a key distinction to the argument.

The analogy to national defence is not a sidenote. Libertarians allow for collective action in national defence. Why do they do that? They do that because they think there is something special about their nation which they would like to protect and of the nation they are trying to create. The exact nature of that is contested, but they allow for national defence to protect it. If they thought there wasn’t something special about it, it wouldn’t be a problem—let anyone come in and take over.

Mass immigration poses similar problems—it risks major changes and unpredictable changes to your society. Everyone understands this, which is why there is virtually no major political party which is for totally open borders. The United States in general, and libertarians specifically are much more open to immigration (and allowing immigrants to become full citizens)on a much larger scale than is is found in most countries or major political parties in Europe. Nevertheless, even in the Unites States, we see some limits.

Libertarians, like nearly everyone else, see the potential problems with mass uncontrolled immigration on the society they wish to have. As such, like national defence, immigration is one of the few areas where libertarians see some role for a national government.

Many people on this blog, Chris particularly, seems to think that libertarians are basically just anarchists in philosophy such that nearly any government intervention must be a violation of their principles. That is incorrect.

If you want to defend libertarianism and try to make sense out of what appear to be contradictions within the theory then do it and stop this mindless finger pointing.

In all of your posts you state that we are ignoring the nuances in libertarianism and then move on directly to saying something to the effect of “don’t call libertarians absurd on immigration because you liberals want public systems of health care which also appears to be absurd yater yater yater….”

You have an invalid premise at work here; namely that philosophical perspective X can be criticised for being absurd but it actually has a reasonably nuanced position therefore what appears to be absurd philosophical perspective Y cannot be criticised for its absurdity because there could be a reasonably nuanced position that we do not see. But what we are interested in is whether or not some specific philosophical perspective actually can succeed in defending a reasonable and nuanced argument that addresses some potential contradictions. It is just idiotic to assume that all philosophical perspectives have an equally good chance of making sense.

So stop taking about the structure of the discussion we are having, stop claiming that it is my job to make sense out of libertarianism, and give us a reasonable libertarian argument on immigration that address some of the apparent contradictions. The only ‘argument’ I can gather from your posts are that 1) we need states and 2) states need national defence, therefore…3) anything fucking goes? Actually we do not know the answer to 3 because you do not tell us, choosing instead to just say ‘national defence’ over and over again as if it is an argument. Weak weak weak!

Insofar as libertarianism is supposed to be an abstract political philosophy transplanted whole from the seminar room to the ballot box, you can play “gotcha” games with these kinds of contradictions. If it’s supposed to be a form of practical government, then an accomodation with nationalism is reasonable, and one may even choose to be a nationalist, libertarian variant. Which I think Ron Paul is…and he is also usefully quite immune to the militarism that has tragically gone along with nationalism.

Granted that there is a certain brand of libertarian who prides themselves precisely on the internal consistency of their abstract ideological committments. But I’m not a big fan of those kinds of libertarians and am glad to see the party nominate someone who is not one of them.

Now I could be wrong, perhaps Chris is deeply involved in understanding the ins and outs of libertarian philosophy. He makes a couple of mistakes that seem obvious to me, but libertarians are much more my natural philosophical allies than people likely to be found on this blog—which is why the mistakes are obvious to me. But that is my point. Someone who would confuse Ron Paul as a close ideological compatriot of Instapundit isn’t really understanding libertarians very well.

Now I’m not at all saying that libertarian thought is so deeply important that you should have to research it deeply if you don’t want to. I happen to think it is interesting and has some useful insights, but that isn’t a widely held belief. I’m just suggesting, Chris, that you don’t understand it enough to be able to so blithely dismiss ‘contradictions’ in libertarian thought. You are taking the slogans as if that was all to the philosophy. Pretty much no philosophy looks great if all you look at is the slogans.

Which is precisely what has happened in libertarian circles. You just have no idea about that because you don’t touch libertarian circles much.

“But the arguments advanced here is of the character, liberals+welfare state=no problem thus libertarians+nationalis=no problem. ”

No. The argument is that it is exactly the same type of problem that liberal and progressive thinkers have, and thus it is no more damning that libertarians have not solved the contradictions inherent to it than it is that liberal thinkers have not solved it. If Chris thinks it is a damning fault of liberals that they don’t move toward the US paying for universal health care in Mexico, I haven’t seen it.

“The point is then that serious thinking liberals when looking at their own theory have been forced to either move away from liberal principles in favour of, at least to some degree, communitarian principles and premises or to argue for some fairly radical cosmopolitan implication on questions of global distributive justice and positive rights duties.”

I suspect you are writing out a vast majority of actual liberals in your definition of “serious thinking liberals” here. Not all that many seem to have moved that direction (unless you count a very small degree as your ‘in some degree’). You see the nuance in the positions of people closer to your ideology only because it is something you easily recognize, not because it fails to exist in libertarian thought. You gloss over the contradiction in your philosophical friends for the same reasons.

One of the central arguments here seems to be that all philosophical perspectives (and by all the libertarian posters here mean liberal egalitarianism) have internal conflicts so you can’t characterise a nationalistic view as non-libertarian because it is just an internal compromise like those that exists in any other philosophical view.

In particular the argument is that liberal egalitarians think we should have states and that standards and claims in distributive justice can be significantly limited by state borders so libertarians can argue that we should have states and the standards of rights protection can be significantly limited or divergent between individuals following state borders.

First, it is true that liberal egalitarianism faces a real problem when it limits the scope of distributive justice to those within a state. This appears to be an arbitrary limit on who is owed equal concern and who is not. But the fact of the matter is that at least over the past ten years just this contradiction has been the central focus for liberal egalitarians, and they see it as a very serious problem within the theory with no clear solution. In fact this debate has shown that the central figure of modern liberal egalitarianism, Rawls, to be communitarian in central aspects of his theory.

The point is then that serious thinking liberals when looking at their own theory have been forced to either move away from liberal principles in favour of, at least to some degree, communitarian principles and premises or to argue for some fairly radical cosmopolitan implication on questions of global distributive justice and positive rights duties. There are some that try to find a liberal position that gives borders moral significance without taking on communitarian views, but these argument are far from dominant and the debate is still very much alive.

But the arguments advanced here is of the character, liberals+welfare state=no problem thus libertarians+nationalis=no problem. But that fist claims is just wrong, and the second claim does not follow. There are HUGE problems with combining libertarian+nationalism and what you libertarians should do is follow liberals in actually doing some work on addressing the conflict and being open to the possibility that it might require you to change either your principles or policy recommendations.

You seem to be saying that in order to preserve the kind of society libertarians want to have it would be necessary to forbid such acts. This brings to mind Nozick’s famous criticism of the “patterned distribution”: that in order to sustain itself it would have to constantly be forbidding capitalistic acts between consenting adults.

BTW the point repeatedly made by Mr Holsclaw, that libertarians support government for national defense seems like a red herring, since the whole point of national defense is to defend against people who would violate your rights.

Immigrating, where the context of the immigration suggest you are likely to direct the powers of the state against innocents, is what some minarchists are worried about.

This is not black and white, because it depends on what a person will do in the future. It sits in a grey area, similar to risk. Clearly it is unacceptable for me to impose risk on you, but if the risk is small, and I benefit from it, and have no way to interact with you ahead of time… most people will it this is OK. (I.e., we permit each other to impose risks by flying airplanes.) Similarly, letting aliens into a state must change its constitution, at least trivially. But that’s not what worries libertarians. It’s letting in huge numbers of new citizens with very different interests, especially in a context like ours where the use of the state to violate rights is normal.

Risk is another area where natural law theory falls apart, BTW.

In answer to your question, of course I am an anarchocapitalist. Anarchy does not have a problem with “immigration” because physical territory is not a very important thing in anarchy.

Is this a new irregular verb?

He is a hypocrite.
You are not being true to your own highest principles.
I have a nuanced view.

Moreover, all philosophical or political movements have among their adherents serious internal disagreements about the proper application of their founding principles to particular policy issues. It is always stupid, counterproductive, and intellectually dishonest to read out of any such movement those who disagree with the majority of their brethren on one or a few of these issues, while clearly generally sharing the key principles.

Immigration policy is one of those issues for libertarians, and several other commenters have laid out good reasons why this should be so. There are plenty of others (minarchism vs. anarchism of course, but also abortion rights and intellectual property, for starters).

So while I happen to agree with Chris that open borders is the best libertarian position, it’s completely ridiculous to claim that anyone who disagrees is ipso facto not a libertarian.